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Good Morning from 1,530 feet up! Cadillac Mountain Sunrise 4:48-5:20am

Time Unveiling Truth

Artist: Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (Italian, 1708–1787)

Date: 1740-1745

Medium: Oil on canvas

Sappho Playing the Lyre

Artist: Léopold Burthe (French, 1823–1860)

Date: 1849

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne, Carcassonne, France

Sappho

Called the Tenth Muse by Plato, Sappho was a prolific poet of ancient Greece. She innovated the form of poetry through her first-person narration (instead of writing from the vantage point of the gods) and by refining the lyric meter. The details of Sappho’s life have been obscured by legend and mythology, and the best source of information is the Suidas, a Greek lexicon compiled in the 10th century.

Sappho was born on Lesbos to a noble family. She lived most of her life in the city of Mytilene, with the exception of her family’s brief exile in Sicily shortly after 600 B.C.E. She married a wealthy man in Mytilene, and they had a daughter names Cleis. Sappho also headed a thiasos, or an academy of unmarried women. As was the custom at the time, wealthy families sent their daughters to live at these schools where they were taught proper social graces, composition, singing, and poetry recitation. Much of Sappho’s poetry was composed in this community, and she used many of her students as subjects.

Perhaps Sappho’s most famous work is her “Ode to Aphrodite”:

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart

but come here if ever before you caught my voice far off and listening left your father’s golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you, quick sparrows over the black earth whipping their wings down the sky through midair -

they arrive. But you, O blessed one, smiled in your deathless face and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why (now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again) to lead you back into her love? Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue. If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them. If she does not love, soon she will love even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard care and all my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish. You be my ally.

Who you've traded your life

Source details and larger version.

Christ Escapes the Pharisees

Artist: Johann Friedrich Overbeck (German, 1789-1869)

Date: 1866

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium